Medical Ethics

Incredible! What happened to medical ethics and the Hippocratic Oath that we have doctors who handpick their patients with health problems that don't make them feel uncomfortable or embarrassed? It seems to me that if they feel squeamish about any phase of handling seriously ill patients, they don't belong in the profession. ELEANOR BRALVER Sylmar

The family of 13-year-old Jahi McMath may have succeeded in transferring the brain-dead teen from an Oakland hospital to undisclosed care facility, but medical experts say it's only a matter of time before not even machines can keep her blood flowing. Bodies of the brain-dead have been maintained on respirators for months or in rare cases even years - and in a few other cases released to families. But once cessation of all brain activity is confirmed, there is no recovery, said Rebecca S. Dresser, professor of law and ethics in medicine at Washington University in St. Louis, who served on a presidential bioethics council that in 2008 reaffirmed "whole-brain death" as legal death.

In her brief life, Theresa Ann Campo Pearson was a medical marvel, an ethical enigma and a cause celebre. Born without a fully formed brain, she lived for nine days and became the focus of an emotional national debate of the definition of death and the suitability of anencephalic infants as organ donors. But was Baby Theresa a person? Was she ever really alive? Two weeks after she was laid to rest in Hollywood, Fla., those vexing questions remain as the tiny infant's haunting legacy.

Leslie Steven Rothenberg, director of UCLA Medical Center's Program in Medical Ethics and an adjunct assistant professor at the UCLA School of Medicine, has been elected a Fellow of the Hastings Center, a research center for the study of ethical issues in medicine and biology. Rothenberg, a 1968 graduate of the UCLA School of Law, recently completed a six-year term as co-chairman of the Los Angeles County Medical and Bar Assns.' Joint Committee on Biomedical Ethics.

As a 3-year-old, Paul Lozano amazed his Mexican immigrant parents by teaching himself to read in English. Announcing that his favorite writer was Dr. Seuss, he promptly devoured every book by the author that he could find. So when Lozano's oldest sister discovered books by Dr. Seuss among his possessions after he killed himself a quarter-century later, the memory carried bitter irony.

When it first came to light last fall, the "Hospice Six" affair was regarded by most people here as a minor impropriety. Half a dozen nurses at the Hospice of St. Peter's had been accepting leftover morphine from the families of patients who had died. They had been storing it in a supervisor's unlocked desk drawer, then giving it to other terminally ill patients in emergencies, when pharmacies were closed. The nurses kept no written records. Dead patients' drugs are supposed to be destroyed.

All hospitals should employ a doctor highly trained in medical ethics to assist surgeons in making decisions about critically ill patients, a meeting of the Congress of Neurological Surgeons in Baltimore was told. "Virtually every major hospital in the country now has an ethics committee, but every ethics committee needs an ethicist as a resource person to whom they can turn," said Dr. Edmund Pellegrino, director of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics in Washington.

"Inmate Seeks to Give Last Kidney to Daughter" (Dec. 5), involving California inmate David Patterson, has sparked my emotions for a few reasons. This situation should not be about medical ethics, or if the taxpayers should foot the bill. This is about saving this little girl's life, which her father might be able to do. If Patterson is willing to risk his life for his daughter's, then I say go for it. It seems like our society has gotten so cynical that we cannot see the greater good anymore.

In a moment both heady and fearsome, Judith Fleming took a few short steps across a stage at UC Irvine's College of Medicine one recent evening--and one giant leap into the world of science. She shook hands with a raft of deans and then was ritually cloaked in the jacket she someday will wear as a physician. The uninitiated might assume it was an age-old ritual--but so-called white-coat ceremonies like this were unknown a decade ago.